Little Havana’s big exodus
New demographics, development change the face of Cuban enclave
MIAMI – Just past the row of Cuban restaurants, past the park where Cubans spend their days playing dominoes, past the crowing roosters and the Bay of Pigs Memorial, there’s a cigar shop in the heart of Little Havana.
Inside Casa del Tabaco, native Cubans spend their days rolling the cigars that have become as synonymous with the Cuban experience as rum, baseball and salsa dancing.
The tobacco leaves used to roll those iconic stogies hold a secret: The seeds are from Cuba, but the plants are grown in Nicaragua, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. The store itself has another surprise: Its owner, René Diaz, isn’t Cuban. He’s from Chile.
That same dichotomy plays out on a larger scale throughout Little Havana. The once predominantly Cuban enclave has changed dramatically in recent years, and development threatens to plow over the historic neighborhood as the population has morphed into a hodgepodge of people from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The area will receive a fresh wave of tourists as Miami hosts Super Bowl LIV.
Little Havana isn’t even majority-Cuban anymore. Officials estimate that the neighborhood of 60,000 is only about a third Cuban.
Diaz said he met a lot of resistance from Cubans when he entered the cigar industry, more so when he opened his store in the middle of Little Havana last year. He made clear that he wants to preserve the Cuban rhythm of the neighborhood to honor its history – and to make sure tourists keep coming.
“This is the closest they’ll get to the Cuban culture without going to Havana,” he said.
Little Havana is a microcosm of the shifts in immigration felt throughout the country and the race to revitalize – or gentrify – urban cores.
Cubans once made up the majority of immigrants in Miami, but the area has been flooded in recent years by immigrants from Central and South America. In the same way, Mexicans once made up the majority of Latin American immigrants to the nation as a whole, but Central and South American migration has increased rapidly.
In 1980, about 354,000 Central Americans were living in the USA. By 2017, that number had exploded to more than 3.5 million, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, changing the makeup of cities big and small across the country.
That trend can be seen clearly in a three-block stretch of Calle Ocho that cuts through the middle of Little Havana. There’s a Honduran restaurant, a Salvadoran one, a Mexican one, even a Colombian-Nicaraguan one that serves food from both countries.
Marcia Romero, 58, moved into the area 18 years ago from her native Nicaragua because she knew it was a friendly place for immigrants. Back then, it was all Cuban. Now?
“This one is Honduran, this one is Honduran; across the street, there is a Salvadoran family,” she said outside the house she rents with her son and grandson. “Oh, wait, that house is still Cuban.”
When the owners of Mi Rinconcito Mexicano opened in Little Havana 13 years ago, critics questioned whether it could survive in the community. The restaurant thrived, employing workers from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba.
“That’s the beauty of Miami,” said Jocelyn Mendoza, the manager at Mi Rinconcito who is originally from Mexico. “People come here and adopt each other’s traditions.”
Sady Guerra, 29, a construction worker from Honduras who arrived in the USA last year with his wife and daughter to request asylum, said he thought he would land in an area dominated by Cubans. After getting to know his new neighborhood, he realized how much had changed.
“Maybe it’s time to change the name,” he joked. “Little Havana worked back then, but now, it’s so mixed, that doesn’t really apply anymore.”
‘The table was set for them’
The area was first populated by Southern Americans willing to take a risk and move to swampy South Florida shortly after it was founded in 1896. The neighborhood transitioned into a working-class Jewish enclave, filled with transplants from New York and other northern cities.
As those Jewish residents moved up the economic ladder, they moved out to newer suburbs developed on the western edges of Miami-Dade County. That exodus happened as Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, which prompted hundreds of thousands of Cubans to flee his communist regime. So many of them landed in the homes vacated by the Jewish residents that it didn’t take long before the neighborhood was dubbed Little Havana.
“The table was set for them,” said Paul George, the resident historian at HistoryMiami Museum.
Most of those Cubans came emptyhanded, their possessions confiscated by the Castro regime. That meant the neighborhood maintained its blue-collar feel, only with more Spanish spoken and plantains for sale.
Cuban businesses and restaurants opened, people moved into the twoand three-story apartment buildings that fill the area, and in 1963, they started playing dominoes in a park that is still in operation.
“That’s a great gathering place for older Cubans,” George said. “Obviously, within this ethnic group, there’s tremendous camaraderie, probably much more so than say the typical American who is sort of suburban-oriented.”
Just as the Jewish residents moved up and out, so did the Cubans. As the years went on and they established themselves economically and politically, many moved to tonier neighborhoods west and south of the area.
That left a gap that immigrants from Central and South America quickly filled.
“Communities are organic things,” said Carlos Fausto Miranda, a Cuban American real estate developer who is heavily invested in Little Havana. “They change and they evolve over time. Little Havana wasn’t always Cuban, and it’s less Cuban now, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less Cuban. These are not mutually exclusive ideas.”
That helps explain why Julio Cabrera picked Little Havana last year when he wanted to open a Cuban restaurant designed to capture the spirit of the legendary bars of pre-Castro Cuba. The renowned cantinero, or bartender, looked at all the hip, popular areas of South Florida and decided to open “La Trova” in Little Havana because he said the neighborhood is still the best embodiment of Miami’s Cuban roots.
“The Cubans moved out, but the essence, the soul of Cuba remains here,” said Cabrera, a Cuban native who emigrated to the United States 15 years ago. “That never left.”
What that means for the future of Little Havana remains unclear as neighborhood leaders grapple between nostalgia and profit.
For decades, the area has been neglected by city leaders, falling into a state of disrepair throughout the 1990s and 2000s. It experienced a resurgence in the past decade as more bars and restaurants opened, and double-decker tour buses made the neighborhood a regular stop on their tours of Miami.
That drew the interest of real estate developers. Miami’s biggest business, aside from tourism, has always been real estate.
A couple of miles east of Little Havana along Calle Ocho sits the Brickell neighborhood, a towering collection of glass-covered, high-rise condominiums and office buildings. One by one, those gleaming towers supplanted the older buildings that made up Brickell’s waterfront skyline, which looks nothing like it did when it featured prominently in the opening credits of “Miami Vice.”
Many worry that Little Havana will become “Brickell West” as developers pounce on the new financial opportunities.
“We don’t want displacement. We don’t want to move the people out of there,” said Juan Mullerat, whose urban design firm Plusurbia created a master plan for the neighborhood last year. “You need to try and protect it as much as you can.”
Holding off eager developers is difficult for a neighborhood that’s received little attention from the city. According to Mullerat, the Miami government has conducted 23 planning studies since 1997 of the nearby Coconut Grove neighborhood, which features wealthier residents, high-rise condominiums and restaurants that cater to highpriced tourists.
Over that same time, the city has conducted only one such plan for Little Havana: the master plan his firm published last year, which hasn’t been adopted by the city.
An endangered piece of history
Part of the problem is that Little Havana remains a working-class neighborhood, where 80% of residences are occupied by renters and more than 87% of rental properties are priced at less than $1,000 a month, according to Mullerat’s study. That’s good news for Miami residents desperate for affordable housing, but it makes it difficult for residents to band together to pressure city leaders to ensure that remains the case.
In 2015, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washingtonbased nonprofit group that works to preserve historic sites, listed Little Havana as one of its 11 most endangered historic places. The organization argued that the neighborhood faced “development pressure, demolition of historic buildings, displacement of existing residents, and zoning changes that could impact its affordability, cultural richness, and character.”
Locals say that threat remains. That’s why Miranda and other real estate developers have tried to preserve Little Havana’s identity on their own.
“You don’t need to come in here and bulldoze city blocks to build brand new sparkling businesses with groundfloor Chipotles and Starbucks,” he said. “We’re showing, and we’re proving, that people thirst for authenticity and thirst for vibrant, urban environments.”
Bill Fuller, another developer, helped ignite the revitalization of Little Havana, reopening the Ball & Chain nightclub that was a fixture in the neighborhood in the early part of the 20th century but was closed for decades. He keeps his office a block away and owns and operates many of the commercial properties in the neighborhood.
Though he calls himself an avowed free-market capitalist, he said other developers in the region know to keep their skyscrapers out of Little Havana.
“I know some of the developers that have built some of the stuff around us … and I’ve told them, ‘Listen, you can build where you want, and I’m not going to put up the public battle, but if you come into these three blocks, you’re going to hear from me.’ ”